How to create a virtual host for a Laravel in Xampp?

virtual host for a Laravel in Xampp?
Developers, need to create virtual hosts in xampp to run multiple projects because that is much easier than accesing the direct path of localhost URL. Creating a virtual host in xampp is very easy, however you may need to configure it correctly for a Laravel project and today we are going to share with you how to do it very easily.

1. Creating a local URL for your laravel app

In this post we want to access our laravel project from the browser accesing the URL //laravel.localhost.com, so you need to modify the hosts file of Windows located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc.

Remember to edit the hosts file using an editor with administrator rights, otherwise you will not be able to save the changes. you can copy host file at desktop and make changes then again copy changed/repalce existing host file into etc folder. Then add the host using a custom host on your system, in this case we will add the 127.0.0.2 host that will be accesible as well with an alias of laravel.localhost.com.

# Copyright (c) 1993-2009 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
# ::1 localhost
127.0.0.2 laravel.localhost.com

You can increase the final number of the host to have multiple of them e.g 127.0.0.3, 127.0.0.4 etc for multple projects.

2. Creating a Virtual Host

The main entry point of a laravel application is the index.php located inside the public folder, so the main directory for our application will be the absolute path to your project in the public folder as shown in the following example. The virtual host should be point out the same host declared in the hosts file of windows (in this case 127.0.0.2) at the port 80. You can create this virtual host appending the following snippet at the end of the content of the httpd-vhosts.conf file located in the xampp folder C:\xampp\apache\conf\extra.